If you’ve not read it yet, go and check out Marco Arment’s A smartphone retrospective. His post from last week shows a bunch of 2007 smartphones, noting that they were cool but flawed, then says the iPhone happened. Despite all the protests about the iPhone’s lack of hardware keyboard, removable battery and expansion, pretty much all rival kit now apes Apple’s. Arment ends by showcasing a number of early 2010 netbooks, then says the iPad happened, and asks where the inexpensive computer space will be in a year.

Well, we’ve already seen various rumours and renders, and now, if Notebookitalia is to be believed, Toshiba’s about to enter the fray. There is, however, another aspect to the hardware shifts that Arment didn’t mention: the specs pissing contest. Most of Apple’s rivals aim to beat it in terms of specs rather than usability. They generally don’t aim for something that’s better for the general user, instead churning out hardware that offers more ‘stuff’.

If this really is to be Toshiba’s iPad ‘killer’, it’s certainly true to form. It’ll supposedly run Android (tick), look a bit like it was designed by Apple on an off day (tick), have more hardware buttons than really necessary (tick), and include a ton of ports, including USB and HDMI (tick). Judging by the images on Notebookitalia, this comes at a big price: form factor. It’s clear if this device makes it to market that it’ll be thicker than the iPad, but the edge with the ports also appears much thicker than its opposite side. This means Toshiba’s pad will have a natural landscape-only orientation, and will be horribly awkward in portrait mode. By contrast, the iPad generally doesn’t care which way up it is and apps encourage the user to turn the device to find a set-up that best suits them.

Still, if Toshiba’s model is released, I’m sure tech journos will claim it’s an iPad killer, because, once again, they’ll read the spec sheet, get terribly excited about things most users don’t care about, and forget that people—normal people—just want to get on and do stuff. Apple’s industrial design and usability will again be dismissed as gloss, right up until the moment its rivals catch up, whereupon those things will somehow become both exciting and essential.

Namco’s iOS games have been underwhelming, with little imagination and a tendency to trot out the same old properties they’ve been reselling since the days of the GBA (at least). That said, Pac-Man games work nicely on iOS: on the iPhone, Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man and Pac-Man: Championship Edition are all great games, if often rather ambitiously priced.

On the iPad, Pac-Man was, disappointingly, an upscaled version of the iPhone game (no universal updates in Namcoland!), with nothing added—until now.

Observant readers will notice that there’s a less-than-subtle ‘thing’ on the screen grab above, which certainly isn’t part of the original Pac-Man arcade game. Namco calls this ‘Pac-Man for iPad [being] equipped with Namco’s online community powered by UniteSDK’. I call it something rather different: a hideous monstrosity.

Whatever compelled Namco to ruin its pixel-perfect Pac-Man port for iPad with this nasty button that you cannot remove, I’ll never know. It’s ugly, and it’s a distraction; worse, it’s totally unnecessary. Did someone at Namco really think: “You know what? When I’m mid-game, fleeing Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde, the one thing I really need to do is tap on a social network icon, just to check on my ‘achievements’ and messages”?

This now-aesthetically-ruined game now merely serves as a lesson to other iOS developers: by all means integrate gaming social networks into your games, but don’t have them ruin things with permanently on-screen graphics or irritating notifications.

Android Central reports that the RIAA’s trying to make it so all cell phones include an FM radio receiver. Now, we already know the music industry is bonkers. The RIAA’s thought in the past that it’s a good idea to sue kids for downloading a few songs online, and U2 manager Paul McGuinness offered the full extent of his crazy in a GQ interview, expertly torn to pieces on No Rock and Roll Fun. But seriously, an FM radio, in every cell phone, PDA and portable device, just because record labels are ‘missing out’ on money they might otherwise get?

I look forward to the proposal of forcing an entire local theatre to be glued to every flat-screen TV.

(Hat tip: Ian Betteridge.)

Oh dear.

No, seriously. Oh dear.

Sony’s decided to fight back against iOS gaming (having lost a huge chunk of handheld marketshare to Apple), and it’s doing so by spraying bullshit at you from your television.

The above two links both lead to the appalling advert Sony’s running. If you don’t care to watch it (and I won’t blame you if that’s the case, since it might make you want to punch things—such as whoever came up with the idea and whoever signed it off, along with your screen, JUST TO STOP THE PAIN), here’s what happens:

Moron on a bike says “Dear PSP, check out this sweet game I got”, holding up a device that doesn’t at all look like an iPhone and yet has graphics worse than any iOS game I’ve ever seen. (And, believe me, I’ve written enough ‘best 10 free iPhone game’ articles now to have seen dozens of very bad iPhone games.) SCREEN PUNCH #1!

Hip kid on a bus (you can tell he’s hip, because he wears his hat in a manner that makes it look like it’s sliding off his head—COOL!) says “That ain’t built for big-boy games”, “That’s built for texting your grandma and calling your girl”. SCREEN PUNCH #2!

It’s pretty clear at this point that hip kid, who is, apparently ‘Marcus Rivers, Deputy of Great Game Deals’, is clearly a colossal idiot. If you have an iPhone, chances are you like convergence. You like being able to ‘text your grandma’ and ‘call your girl’; but you also like the fact it does a whole bunch of stuff other than just playing games, although it does that rather well, too, and there are tens of thousands to choose from.

The thing is, I seem to remember a certain other device was once heralded as the King of Convergence. I’m pretty sure it was by Sony and called the PS… something.

Anyway, on with the ad!

Hip kid shoves a PSP into the camera, and yells that for only $9.99, you could be playing THIS! and THIS! and THIS! At this point, I nearly set fire to all my iOS devices before realising that for more than even the most expensive high-end iOS games, hip kid was telling me I could instead buy aged, budget PSP titles! Hurrah! (Incidentally, THIS!, THIS! and THIS! turn out to be GENERIC-O-RACER, RUBBISH-O-QUIZ GAME and CARTOON GOLF GAME. Man, if only the App Store was full of racing games, quiz games and the likes of Let’s Golf!) SCREEN PUNCH #3!

Moron on a bike now gets confused and excited, and hip kid makes everyone’s built-in ‘black person stereotype detection device’ explode in a mixture of overload, fury and SCREEN PUNCH #4! Presumably, Sony’s marketing is aiming to snare dim people who’ve teleported in from the early 1980s.

“Step your game up,” concludes the advert (rather obnoxiously trademarking the phrase). It’s advice Sony should itself take to heart, rather than spewing garbage about the competition. Amusingly, the final logo is Sony’s own, with ‘make believe’ under it. It may as well say ‘away with the fairies’ or ‘WE HAVE TOTALLY LOST IT! PLEASE SEND HELP RIGHT AWAY! NYYYAAAHHHH!’

CrunchGear reports on the Axon Logic Hackintosh tablet, with the headline ‘Axon Logic Hackintosh Tablet May Just Out-iPad The iPad’. So, how’s this device planning on doing this? Well, it’s been “designed from the ground up to be compatible with any Darwin OS”, which means it’ll support (unofficially, natch) Mac OS X.

So, CrunchGear says this will beat the iPad by using Mac OS X, an operating system not designed for touch. Furthermore, the touchscreen is resistive, so wave bye to multitouch. Wow, that really sounds like it’ll out-iPad the iPad to me!

Quick tip to everyone in the journo game: the way to out-iPad the iPad is to make something better and more usable than the iPad, so stop reporting otherwise. Don’t just get all excited by a spec list, because the vast majority of users don’t care. Get excited by a system that is more intuitive, and that is better designed for touch. By all means advocate something more powerful for advanced tasks, or with USB ports, or with a card reader welded to it. But ensure the device is better from a usability and user-experience standpoint; don’t just prattle on about a desktop operating system glued to something vaguely resembling an iPad and call it an ‘iPad killer’.